Hari Nef, Model Citizen

How the transgender alt-glam scenester faces the demands of being a muse and a mouthpiece.

“There isn’t a trans moment. There were zero, and now there are ten to fifteen.”

Photograph by Brian Vu for The New Yorker

A few days before graduating from Columbia University, in May, 2015, the actress and model Hari Nef showed up at a Flatiron office building to meet Ivan Bart, the president of IMG, the agency that represents supermodels such as Kate Moss and Gigi Hadid. She had walked a few runways at a recent New York Fashion Week, but after a spate of rejections from other modelling agencies her expectations were low. “No one even would meet with me,” Nef, who has dark eyes, pouty lips, and punkish brown bangs, told me. “The verdict each time was ‘Hey, we think you’ve got a great personality, and you’ve got a really unique look. We just don’t understand how we could make money off of you.’ ”

For the IMG meeting, Nef wore skinny jeans, ankle boots from Topshop, and a tight black turtleneck, to show off her figure: fashion-model drag, she said later. Sitting on a leather couch, she told Bart about her studies at Columbia. (She was a drama major.) “She reminded me of Stella Tennant back in the nineties—beauty with an edge,” Bart recalled. “I knew that Hedi Slimane”—then the designer for Saint Laurent Paris—“would love her.”

Not expecting much to come of the meeting, Nef went back uptown. At commencement, she wore a black-and-white cocktail dress under her robe—a gift from the designer Prabal Gurung—and diamond earrings, from her father. (“They were roses, because I’m ‘blossoming,’ ” she said, rolling her eyes.) Then she took an Amtrak back to Newton, Massachusetts, to stay with her mother and stepfather for a week or so before moving into a dingy East Village apartment with two roommates.

During that visit, while walking through a Whole Foods parking lot, Nef got a call from a producer of “Transparent,” the TV series about a Jewish septuagenarian who comes out as transgender to her three dysfunctional children. The show’s creator, Jill Soloway, had met Nef through her sister, Faith Soloway, Nef’s former counsellor at an arts camp. At Faith’s suggestion, a few months earlier Jill had brought Nef to a gala for PFLAG (originally known as Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays). The producer on the phone was calling to offer Nef a recurring role on “Transparent.” Jill Soloway told me later, “I remember marvelling at how she fills a frame—her face and her posture, but also how her energy naturally engaged every subject and object within that frame. I think this is something that maybe Warhol felt for Sedgwick, Demy for Deneuve, Allen for Keaton. I found my ‘it’ girl.”

Nef e-mailed Bart at IMG to tell him about the TV offer and ask for some contract advice. He telephoned right away to say, “We’re going to sign you.” As Nef later recounted in Lenny Letter, Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner’s feminist newsletter, she sat in the living room with her mother, whose giddiness soon morphed into parental concern. “There are going to be a lot of people looking at you,” she warned. “They will say hurtful things they’ll think you’ll never read, and you’ll read them. I know you—you’ll read them.”

The professional turning point was not lost on Nef, nor was its larger significance: she had become the first openly transgender woman to receive a worldwide modelling contract. “It was, like, a stroke of God,” she said. “Or Goddess.”

The so-called transgender moment has been full of firsts, although some victories are clearer than others. In 2014, the actress Laverne Cox, from “Orange Is the New Black,” became the first transgender woman to be nominated for an Emmy and to appear on the cover of Time. Last year, Caitlyn Jenner was the first internationally known celebrity to come out as transgender. Politically, Jenner sends a mixed message: while she invited activists like Janet Mock to appear on her reality show, “I Am Cait,” she endorsed Ted Cruz for President. Hollywood has piled on with serious movies like “Dallas Buyers Club” and “The Danish Girl” (about Lili Elbe, one of the first transgender women to undergo sex-reassignment surgery), but both starred cisgender—meaning non-trans—men.

There have been transgender fashion models over the decades, but most kept their identities secret (and many still do). The model April Ashley appeared in British Vogue in 1960, but her career ended abruptly when she was outed by the tabloids. Caroline (Tula) Cossey posed for Playboy in 1981, while promoting her role in “For Your Eyes Only,” but then News of the World ran the salacious headline “James Bond’s Girl Was a Boy.” The openly transgender model Teri Toye had a short career in the mid-eighties, before returning to Iowa to be a historic preservationist. Connie Fleming modelled for Thierry Mugler in 1992, under the moniker Connie Girl, but the decade was kinder to drag queens, like RuPaul, who achieved crossover success with the hit single “Supermodel (You Better Work).”

These days, the fashion world seems ready to capitalize on the new trans visibility. Barneys featured trans models in its spring 2014 campaign. Andreja Pejić, who grew up in a Serbian refugee camp, was discovered while working at a McDonald’s in Melbourne and became successful as a male runway model, before revealing that her fine-boned androgyny was the result of a synthetic hormone and relaunching her career as a female model. Then, there are the murkier efforts: in January, Jaden Smith, the precocious son of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, modelled women’s wear for Louis Vuitton, leading advocates to wonder whether gender fluidity was simply the latest iteration of flat chests and bare midriffs. I asked Mara Keisling, the executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, if she thought the fashion industry was using trans people to some extent. “Sure,” she said. “But that’s fine—we’ll use the fashion industry.”

The trans pop-culture preoccupation has been only loosely connected to advances in social policy, sometimes dishearteningly so. Just twenty states have laws explicitly protecting people from employment and housing discrimination based on gender identity. Transphobic hate crimes tripled in the United States from 2014 to 2015, and nineteen trans Americans have been murdered this year, almost all of them African-American. Forty-one per cent of transgender Americans have attempted suicide, compared with five per cent of the general population. And a rash of “bathroom bills,” barring transgender people from using public rest rooms that match their gender identities, have been introduced across the country—a backlash, Keisling surmised, against gay marriage and mainstream transgender visibility.

Hari Nef is skeptical of what she sees as cultural tokenism. She arrives at interviews armed with memorized statistics that she receives from Keisling’s organization, where she is an advocate affiliate. “There isn’t a trans moment,” she told me. “There were zero, and now there are ten to fifteen. That’s not a moment. If anyone’s having a moment, it’s white cis men.” She continued, “It’s just a presence where there was an absence. We deserve so much more.”

Nef’s burgeoning career has imposed contradictory demands on her: she is supposed to embody a rarefied brand of stylish cool, but, because she is a de-facto mouthpiece, she calls out her industry for valuing “trans aesthetics” over trans lives. At twenty-three, she is fluent in both Tumblr slang and academic buzzwords, name-checking Foucault with a Valley Girl drawl. At one point, discussing a phase in her life when she went by nonbinary pronouns, she used the gender theorist Judith Butler’s name as a verb. (“I was, like, ‘O.K., I can Judith Butler my way in and out of this.’ ”) She displays some of the well-documented traits of the millennial generation: a hyperawareness of racial privilege, an overreliance on the word “literally,” and a prowess with social media. She has more than a hundred thousand Instagram followers, who pore over her boho-chic looks (she is rarely without her tattoo choker), accented by an exposed breast or a surly glare. When Galore asked her what mantra she lives by, she answered, “Take what is yours.”

Nef’s contract with IMG made international news, but even before that she had honed her persona as an alt-glam queer scenester. “I’m not a Girl, not yet an It-Girl,” she wrote in an online diary for Dazed. A Chloë Sevigny devotee, she mastered the art of the gnomic fashion-mag Q. & A. The decade that defines her personal style? “The fourteen-thirties.” Her favorite color? “The color of my face when I cry.” Her introspective gender fluidity dovetailed with an “it” girl’s practiced mystique: in a 2013 essay for the trans magazine Original Plumbing, she described her body as “a raincheck, a cliffhanger, an IOU.” On Dunham’s podcast, Women of the Hour, she discussed her dating challenges: “People, like, they want to be sexy and go along with it, but, like, sometimes they just freak out. It’s a fascinating negotiation. But not talking about it worked pretty well last night.”

Designers who dress Nef sometimes go full femme; other times they play up her supposed androgyny, which involves its own set of clichés. “I cannot tell you how many shoots are, like, ‘We just want to make you glam rock and Bowie,’ ” Nef told me. Giving a talk on unisex fashion at the Museum of Modern Art in May, she showed the audience Helmut Newton’s iconic 1975 photograph of a woman smoking in an Yves Saint Laurent tuxedo, and said, “This image is shoved in my face on, like, every shoot I have ever done.” Gucci’s creative director, Alessandro Michele, who in January put Nef in his Milan menswear show—as a woman—told me, “Hari is beautiful because she is free.” But to look at her freedom up close is to see someone walking a tightrope.

One snowy day in February, Nef was on the top floor of an industrial building in Greenpoint, being photographed for the French fashion magazine Jalouse. A Japanese photographer named Piczo snapped away, offering monosyllabic feedback (“Nice. Good. Good. Yep”) as she posed in a faux-fur coat that exposed a vertical sliver of pale torso.

“Because of the elections here in America, we wanted to do a story on her as the new Miss America,” a stylist named Helena Tejedor explained. “My assistant just went to get a majorette costume.” Tejedor had been studying the photographs of Joel Meyerowitz and Amy Arbus and wanted to capture the “seventies disco years, when everyone was way more free in New York.”

Nef sat at a mirror in a white robe as a makeup artist applied lipstick. New York Fashion Week was under way, and Nef had been going to parties almost every night. But she hadn’t been booked for any shows yet. “I won’t really take it personally,” she said. “It’s runway fashion. Typically, the only girls who do those are the teens, the straight-up-and-down girls, the five-eleven, 34-23-34 girls—who aren’t trans.”

She posed in a sheer top, Hawaiian-print pantaloons, and big sunglasses: jet-setter meets Rhoda Morgenstern. At one point, the conversation turned to “The Little Mermaid,” and Nef declared, “Ariel is the most boring Disney princess. She literally gives up her voice for a vagina.” Nef does not broadcast the medical details of her transition—a protocol observed by transgender celebrities like Laverne Cox, who once told a curious Katie Couric, “The preoccupation with transition and with surgery objectifies trans people.” But Nef seemed ambivalent. She nonchalantly discussed going to a clinic for “ ’mones,” but couldn’t decide whether to tell me about an upcoming procedure, even though I hadn’t asked.

“Should we try the cover?” Tejedor asked. Nef changed into a tulle dress by Gucci and a denim jacket with butterfly patches. “She looks like a well-known groupie,” Tejedor said. “Like someone you have to get permission from but will be nice to you.” Nef stood barefoot near a neon sign that read “Fuck Me Tender,” and fixed the camera with a look of luxurious indifference. Afterward, she and Tejedor reviewed the results on a monitor.

“Do I look dead in the eyes?” Nef wondered aloud. “I always think I look dead, but I never actually do.”

On “Transparent,” Nef’s character, Gittel, a transsexual ancestor of the main characters, is seen, in flashbacks, in late-Weimar Berlin. Gittel has found refuge at the Institute of Sexual Research, a real place that was run by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, one of the first advocates for the rights of sexual minorities. We first glimpse her dancing at a smoky soirée. Jill Soloway told me, “Replace Chanel shift dresses with Hood by Air, Claire Waldoff with Mykki Blanco or Big Freedia, and this is where you’d meet Hari today—in the thick of it.” She went on, “Gittel was a vibrant member of a youth culture fuelled by a hybrid of possibility and nihilism that very much mirrors kids these days.”

As a child, Nef was easily absorbed by alternative worlds. While listening to an audio guide on a visit to the Egyptian collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, she upbraided her grandparents when they tried to get her attention. “Sh-h-h!” she said. “I’m going back in time.” Born in Philadelphia, she moved to Newton with her mother, Robin Clebnik, after her parents divorced, when she was two. Growing up, she spent hours playing video games.

When adolescence hit, she traded gaming for MySpace. “I was really into emo and scene culture in middle school,” she said, “and grew my hair out and lost a bunch of weight, and I listened to My Chemical Romance and dabbled in self-harm.” To preëmpt bullying, she would spread gossip about herself and how edgy she was. When her parents heard that she had smoked pot at a bar mitzvah, she was grounded for two months; she had started the rumor herself. She began to experiment sexually with boys at fourteen. She dyed her hair—red, purple, blond with blue zigzags—and changed clothing styles with abandon. “I was a new person every week.”

In ninth grade, she told her mother that she wanted to announce on Facebook that she was gay. Clebnik was cautious but supportive: in liberal Jewish suburbia, having a gay son wasn’t such a big deal. Nef found a boyfriend weeks into freshman year, a junior who later appeared on “Project Runway.” On weekends, she flipped through fashion magazines at Borders. She grew to loathe Newton’s pressure-cooker academic environment—a close friend developed an Adderall addiction—but she got good grades and became captain of the speech team. “I was never good at being a boy, but I was always a good student,” she said.

She and her mother fought constantly. Nef recalled, “I just saw this, like, tyrant. And she saw me as this bottomless soul of irritability and entitlement and arrogance. We were both right.” The relationship has improved since Nef started transitioning. “I was dysphoric for my whole high-school career and I didn’t realize it,” she said. Envisioning a life of her own in New York City sustained her. In her graduation speech, she called Newton a “toxic bubble.”

Nef entered Columbia in 2011. She led a bifurcated life: school uptown, the club scene downtown. She read Woolf and Chekhov and Euripides and, most significant, Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble.” “Even though I wanted to, like, die and hide, that discourse can keep you warm at night,” she said. The first time she left her dorm room in women’s clothing, she ran into a guy in the stairwell who looked her up and down and laughed. She was crushed. She had a job in the classics department, where her boss, Geraldine Visco, got her to perform with her art-rock group, Gerry and the Twinks. Nef became a regular at Vandam, a weekly SoHo bacchanal thrown by Susanne Bartsch, the party promoter, where she met trans night-life celebrities like Amanda Lepore.

During Nef’s sophomore year, the drag artist Alexis Blair Penney invited her to perform at an East Village bar called Niagara. She showed up with her face painted blue and delivered a Shakespeare soliloquy into her phone. Nef, Penney, and three others formed a punk-drag collective called Chez Deep. Nef was the baby of the group—the rest were in their twenties—and they toured in Miami and Glasgow. One night, Nef shaved her head onstage while lip-synching to Lauryn Hill. During the summer of 2014, the group lived together in Bed-Stuy. It was around this time that Nef realized that she felt more comfortable performing as a woman than she ever had felt living life as a man. She had briefly asked people to refer to her using the pronouns “they” and “them.” “I couldn’t bring myself to just sell out and go to the other side of the binary,” she said. “I was, like, ‘Maybe there’s a way out of it. Maybe I can be a gender warrior.’ But my ties to masculinity were not strong enough to keep me in the middle.”

She informed the Columbia drama department that she would audition only for female roles. For her thesis, she played Arkadina in “The Seagull.” She is keen to tackle Lady Macbeth. (“I like to play problem women.”) For her parents, the learning curve was steep. “The pronouns are hard,” Clebnik told me. “I have twenty-three years of seeing Hari and picturing her in my mind, so it is very difficult to say ‘she’ when you’re picturing a boy.” As Nef began hormone treatment, her relationship with other members of Chez Deep became strained. She didn’t want to lip-synch anymore, and wondered whether drag was misogynist, since it lampoons femininity. In 2014, she sent a letter formally withdrawing from the group, which disbanded soon after.

Nef had interned at fashion companies, including the Web site VFiles, but suddenly people were noticing her changing appearance and urging her to step in front of the camera. One night at an East Village club, Shayne Oliver, the designer of Hood by Air, told her, “Girl, I want you in the show!” In the fall of 2014, Nef made her New York Fashion Week début. The original plan was to send her out topless, “my six-month budding breasts in a harness, and combat boots and paint,” she recalled. But Oliver put her in navy trousers and a white button-down shirt. Nef was disappointed, until she watched the video and saw her body in motion. “I looked like Bilbo Baggins,” she said, “but I was walking like Naomi Campbell.”

At the Jalouse shoot, Nef told me that she was waiting on a big call—a major fashion brand had auditioned her twice for New York Fashion Week. Modelling is a breakneck business: during fashion weeks, aspirants scurry from one casting session to the next, sometimes getting offers hours before runway shows. Nef didn’t get the job, but, days later, H&M booked her for Paris Fashion Week.

Paris was “fun and brutal and dehumanizing,” she said when she got back. She’d had a romance with a German model, who she said is “nonbinary and genuinely queer.” They’d gone to a party held in Coco Chanel’s former apartment and sat two seats away from Karl Lagerfeld. Nef was enthralled by the Paris scene, which, she reported, “literally makes New York Fashion Week look like free-burrito day at Chipotle.” But not everything had gone smoothly. Right before the H&M show, the woman dressing Nef had given her a long look and said, “Are you a model? You’re a little uglier and fatter than the other girls.”

Undaunted, Nef returned home and continued showing up at events looking flawless. At the C.F.D.A. Fashion Awards, in June, she struggled to fit her sea-foam Gucci gown over her “big old trans rib cage.” She spent the ceremony twisting in her seat so that Anna Wintour, her tablemate, wouldn’t see her unzipped back. The next night, she was to attend the Fragrance Foundation Awards—the Oscars of the perfume world, known as the Fifis. “I’m not really in a party mood,” she said during the Uber ride to Alice Tully Hall. Chanel had dressed her for the evening: metallic platform sandals, a tiered chiffon dress in bright, beachy colors, and gigantic hoop earrings that flew off whenever she made a sudden movement. She wore her favorite fragrance, a Maison Margiela Replica scent, designed to evoke a particular Tokyo tearoom in 2008.

At Lincoln Center, an attendant pointed her toward a white tent teeming with photographers. Red carpets unnerve her: “Having your body in front of the firing squad like that can just feel really vulnerable,” she told me in the car. In May, she and Rowan Blanchard, the Disney Channel star, commiserated via Twitter (Blanchard: “It’s so soul sucking”) in an exchange that was summarized in the magazine Oyster with the hashtag “firstworldproblems.”

Nef was shown to an area where V.I.P.s were lined up like kids waiting to go down a water slide. She ran into a friend, the Victoria’s Secret model Stella Maxwell, who wore a blazer over a lacy black bra.

Maxwell eyed Nef’s loud dress. “Subtle,” she joked. Maxwell strode into the scrum, and photographers snapped and yelled “Stella!” It sounded like a production of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” “She’s such a pro,” Nef observed.

She was about to go on when an organizer held her back: Lionel Richie was coming through. Nef murmured, “Lionel Richie should definitely walk in front of me, but that’s another weird thing about red carpets—the fame game.” She finally stepped onto the carpet, to photographers’ shouts. Halfway down, an interviewer approached with a microphone.

Fashion faux pas averted, Nef went inside for cocktail hour. She spotted two other transgender guests, Laverne Cox and Andreja Pejić. Scarcity breeds solidarity: not long ago, Nef was asked to do full-frontal nudity and, flummoxed, she sent Cox a direct message on Instagram. “She was literally the only person I could think of to talk about that with, and I barely even know her,” Nef said. (Cox advised her to decline.)

Cowbells signalled the start of the awards ceremony, and Nef took her seat in Row T. Alec Baldwin, the host, made some opening remarks, while Nef scrolled on her phone to see if any red-carpet photos had been posted.

Like most avatars of progress, Nef must navigate tricky terrain. While she leads a life of enviable glamour, any public display of success comes with asterisks. Has she made inroads into the mainstream? Sure, she’ll say, but she’ll credit her brave predecessors. And she quickly acknowledges that she is privileged: she is college-educated, well off, and white; she knows that trans women of color face much higher rates of violence and discrimination. She is critical of the fashion industry, which she calls “conservative,” but wary of saying anything that will cost her a job. She finds it exhausting to talk about her identity all the time. But, given her platform and her perks, she knows that she shouldn’t be complaining.

Not long ago, Nef arranged a Skype call with two black trans women who had criticized her on Tumblr. They had said she was “entitled” and “full of shit” for trying to speak for their community, and scolded her for working with the photographer Terry Richardson, who has been accused of sexually assaulting models. Nef responded with a flip post, advising them to “find another girl.” During the Skype call, set up by a mutual friend, Nef explained that she often worried about alienating fashion people. Her interlocutor responded, “You need to toughen up, girl. You sound weak as fuck!”

When I asked Nef about Caitlyn Jenner, who will appear in Season 3 of “Transparent,” she hedged—“I’m kind of fascinated by this idea that she could be our liaison to the right”—before admitting that she didn’t want to antagonize the Kardashians. Then she paused and shook her head, annoyed with herself. She said, “I need to stop trying to appeal to everybody and just speak my mind.” She laid into Jenner: “Why isn’t she angrier? Why isn’t she posting a photo on her Instagram of every trans woman that gets murdered?” Then she remembered the Skype exchange. “Everything she was saying about me I just said about Caitlyn.”

One night in March, I met Nef in Long Island City, at a benefit for a humanitarian organization called Circle of Women. Wearing a backless dress, she sat with some friends at a long banquet table. During the speeches, Nef looked preoccupied. The day before, the governor of North Carolina, Pat McCrory, had signed a statewide “bathroom bill.” The law was already drawing criticism from corporations threatening to boycott the state, and would go on to inspire national outrage reaching up to the White House. But Nef was despondent. “I couldn’t get out of bed this morning,” she said. “It’s literally putting trans people under house arrest.”

As the party guests got up to mingle, she remained in her chair. “I don’t want to have a perfect body. I just want to have a chill body. I just want to have a casual body that people don’t stare at.” It seemed like an odd sentiment for a model, but, tearing up, she continued, “I don’t want to keep doing these auditions thinking about my deep-ass voice. Because it’s the chicken or the egg: am I ashamed or am I made to feel ashamed? At the end of the day, you just feel ashamed.”

She took a breath and wiped her eyes. “I need a cigarette,” she said. “Wanna ditch?” We ordered a car and rode over the Queensboro Bridge. Nef had been summoned to meet some friends, including Pamela Anderson and Mel Ottenberg (Rihanna’s stylist), at Harry Cipriani. Before going in, she stood outside the Sherry Netherland and smoked. Suddenly, her face lit up.

“She’s trans!” she screamed, pointing toward Fifth Avenue. She had spotted a model friend on a Diesel ad atop a taxi. She smirked. “Not to clock her, but I think she’s open about it.”

For a moment, she seemed content. Then she flicked away her cigarette and went inside to see Pamela Anderson. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the September 26, 2016, issue, with the headline “Model Citizen.”